Black Week

Night had fallen. The President's train coursed northward through the moonlit Shenandoah Valley, bearing him back to Washington from Charlottesville. At the State Department in Washington, a message marked "Personal for the President" awaited him. It was French Premier Paul Reynaud's last appeal for "clouds of war-planes." The U. S. had no such clouds to give. At Charlottesville. Mr. Roosevelt had already said: the U. S. would throw into World War II. on the Allies' side, all that it had except its man power.

Events soon outpaced the 90 Navy bombers, the 173 Army attack planes which were assembled for dispatch to Canada and thence to Europe. Mr. Roosevelt had had to go through the devious farce of "trading in" the planes. 600,000 World War I rifles, 68.000 old machine guns, 875 French and British 755, other munitions to private manufacturers, who in turn sold them to the Allies.

To get to Canada, planes had to land at tiny (pop. 6.000) Houlton. Me., then be towed across the line into Canada. Hitler's legions were faster.

The President said at a press conference that the U. S. was doing what it could.

Correspondent Mark Sullivan listened, noted nuances in Mr. Roosevelt's words and manner, wrote: "One was reasonably sure that Mr. Roosevelt ... in due course will do more. But the time to speak of it was not yet." When to speak? What to say? What to do? These were the enormous questions which the U. S. people along with their President pondered last week. In U. S. opinion there was conflict, disunion. Yet there was an over-all unity of concern.

Dead was Isolation in its old, blunted sense of separation from Europe and Europe's world. Aborning was a new and sensitive Isolation, a conscious turning inward for the strength and means to stand in and against the world of Hitler.

Rending were the birth pangs. They had a nightmare quality--of belated haste to aid the Allies, to beat warring men in machines with impersonal, insufficient machines without men; then, slowly, a blank awareness that this escapist outlet was no outlet at all.

>At Dallas, Tex., on Flag Day, 15,000 Texans resolved for all help to the Allies except men & blood, applauded when the resolution's sponsor said: If this "leads to war, then we will meet that issue. ..." But when the grave faces bowed in prayer {see cut}, the refrain was: "Lead us not into war but into peace."

>Whoa, Mr. President," cried the Detroit News, sensing in Franklin Roosevelt's nonbelligerent intervention a pull toward war. Hundreds of letters approved (8-to-1) the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's, bitter declaration that the President, unless checked, would take the U. S. over the brink of war.

>Montana's Wheeler in the Senate (see p. 75), Charles Lindbergh on the air detected and resisted a drift toward total U. S. war. Nearer the core of U. S. fear and feeling was Poetess Edna St. Vincent Millay, writing in the New York Times:

Oh, build, assemble, transport, give, That England, France and we may live . . . Lest . . . we be left to fight alone.

"Only the Congress." Such were the winds and windings of U. S. sentiment which fettered the President when Europe fell apart. One of his next moves, a few hours before Paul Reynaud resigned and France asked for Peace (see p. 20), was to answer the outgoing Premier. Mr. Roosevelt's promise of continued aid "in ever-increasing quantities and kinds" had meaning only for Great Britain; abruptly there were no more Allies to aid. But in his message were grave, prophetic words: "The Government of the United States will not consider as valid any attempts to infringe by force the independence and territorial integrity of France." In plain English, this meant that the U. S. would never appease, help, live with a Nazi Europe. Said the President to Paul Reynaud, whose only hope had been a U. S. declaration of war: ". . . These statements carry with them no implication of military commitments. Only the Congress can make such commitments."

At the White House, all over Washington with the news of France's surrender, there settled an air of inescapable anticlimax. Secretary of State Hull, grave but calm, prematurely assumed that fighting had ceased in France. Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau announced the British would assume French contracts for 3,100 planes, other orders for munitions.

Franklin Roosevelt went off for a Sunday cruise on the Potomac. With him was Count Rene de Chambrun, a French military attache; they hovered over the White House yacht's radio. The President slept until 7 a.m. of France's dark day, returned refreshed and ready to act within the limits of his great powers. Some of them he used forthwith--to wave U. S. planes on across the Canadian border, without the tragi-comic delay at Houlton; to form his lines for economic defenses of the Western Hemisphere (see below); to keep French assets in the U. S. from falling into Nazi hands; to have a cruiser prepared for a quick dash to Europe.

Night had fallen on France, but the U. S. faced another day.

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